The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  And music first persuaded Dr. Ressler to open. Frank was sitting with Annie, on another of her late visits. I joined them for half an hour before heading down the hall on an uncharacteristically bold, dark-inspired whim. I found Dr. Ressler where he always spent the first hours of the shift: in the cramped control room, the closet of consoles and flickering modems. I listened at the door, although I hardly needed to: on the far side, the same music that had been playing the day I met him. I knocked, not even hoping he’d let me in.

  But he did, as genteelly as ever. I’d already discovered that frontal assaults would not overcome his privacy. When I’d confronted him pointblank with the printed proof of his earlier profession, Dr. Ressler responded only with amusement. “You can’t be interested in such inconsequentials.” That night, I easily might have run into the same impasse. He asked with a concealed smile how the news scrapbook was going, then scowled when I told him Todd had already lost interest in the project. “Our friend’s cultivated character flaw,” he said, “is a refusal to finish things.”

  He was attentive; he several times asked if I would prefer the swivel chair, if I would like the room a little warmer or cooler, if the music bothered me. But he just as easily fell into unselfconscious silence, and he never once asked why I’d dropped in. We might have sat mute all evening if I hadn’t at last said, desperate for a topic, “I used to play these things once. In my teens.”

  He sat forward as if slapped. “You play?”

  “‘Played’ would be closer to the fact. I haven’t touched a keyboard in years.”

  “You were good?” he asked, gesturing to the pealing from the speakers. “Good enough to play these?”

  “That was part of the problem. I could play the easiest of the set. With a few, I even reproduced something more than the notes. But the harder ones …”. I imitated his wave, not knowing whether to direct it toward the speakers as he had, or toward the turntable, where the generation was taking place. One of the more demanding variations was in the air, a juggling act demanding three separate hands each under the control of its own brain.

  I kept talking, not wanting to do anything to endanger his alertness. As with stalking, smooth motion seemed better than sudden, even sudden freezing. “There are two sorts of piano students. The first is proud of the piece she’s just mastered. The second hears the next piece snickering. I started out as the first, but drifted into the second.”

  “I know,” Dr. Ressler said. He’d grown as effusive as a boy on a first date. “Oh, I can’t say I know. I’ve never taken a music lesson in my life. I am your classic, digital autodidact. I can clunk along on a keyboard fairly grammatically, but with the thick accent of a Pole who has learned to speak English through books.” He looked at me, and his eyes shone. “You give me a chance to learn something from a native speaker.” I demurred, but he took no notice. “As a self-taught listener, I’ve often felt, as you describe, pieces snicker at my inability to hear a fraction of what’s going on in them.” This time he didn’t bother to wave at the offender.

  We listened, quiet in the exertion. Even his silence seemed preparation. “Certain pieces,” he resumed, “have to be put away for a long time. I can’t listen to them; they’re too evocative. They possess an intensity incommensurate with everyday life. But when I take them out again from their place in the back of the closet where they’ve waited for years, I can’t stop listening.” I couldn’t stop listening to him, to what I’d first haunted this place hoping to hear. “Not long ago, around the time your friend took up as my shift assistant,” he grinned, “after several years of not being able to bear it, I found I wanted to study this set again.” He contracted his mouth into a grimace: the architecture of the sound, despite his best effort, still held his ears’ ability in joyful contempt.

  I took a chance. “You’ve studied them before?”

  The grimace broke into a full good humor. He knew I was fishing—the same pond I’d pointlessly trawled a few times before. He was no more eager now to grant an interview, but as someone who might be able to tell him something, however modest, about keyboards, I had him over a barrel organ. He might never have talked so easily had Todd been there. Maybe he considered me a cousin who had also failed to end up in her chosen field. Maybe he saw that I was ready, after thirty years, to begin my education in information science.

  Whatever his reason, Ressler told me a story. He spoke of a series of nights as a young man when he first discovered the Goldbergs. A week of concentration, when the closed code of music at last broke. “Dangerously close to turning twenty-six, paid to do genetic research, I instead spent evenings lying in an army barracks bed, listening to that aria over and over in my ears, eyes, throat, and head. I was trying to discover why the thirty minute waltzes reduced me to hopeless emotion, to neutralize them through over-exposure so I could forget them and recover an even emotional keel.

  “I had secured myself a pocket score. You must understand that as late as my mid-twenties, I could detect little more in printed notes than inscrutable black bugs crawling across the bars of their prison. I’m still illiterate, to some degree. Some things one must learn before five or they never come fluidly.”

  I had a hard time imagining this man as illiterate at anything. But I didn’t dare contradict; he was venting decades of introspection, and I wasn’t about to stop him for polite objection.

  “Who knows? Perhaps I have repressed all memory of an unspeakable grade-school accident involving an unmarked glockenspiel that left me unable to listen to rhythmic pitches without suspicion.” He checked my face, to see if he had lost the cadence of humor. “But oddly,” he went on, shaking his head, “for some reason I am still trying to puzzle out, from my very first listening, this piece seemed to me less like music than a rescue message. Word from a place I had lived once, but could not find my way back to. That sounds ridiculously romantic, especially for an eighteenth-century piece! But after uncountable listening to a beaten-up copy of the variations lent me by a labmate, I began matching aural events in the rush of notes with the complex symbols standing for those events on the page. The day I finally figured out how the correspondence actually worked, it took the top of my head off. Incrementally, over hours of effort, I found one night that I could actually read the score. Incredible! Without actually playing the record, I could transcribe the aria from the page to my head. I could hear the chords themselves, just as if the Wunderkind on the recording were in fact playing it. That, young woman, is power.”

  He paused long enough to shoot me a playful look. “As you know from bibliographic snooping, I was then engaged in tracing the exact mechanism by which macromolecules code for inherited traits.” He took a breath. For a terrible moment, I thought he was about to choke. “A big project. Several of my colleagues are still at the task. Their offspring will still be at it. We had arrived at a cusp. We knew a little; enough to know that further extrapolation would require a whole new zoo of relational models. Certain things we already suspected: a long, linear informational string wound around its complement, like a photo pinned to its own negative, for further, unlimited printing.”

  I had only a dilettantish idea what he was talking about, a modest background from answering a rash of alarmed questions about patented new forms of life. I’d been proud of the bit I had mastered until that moment, when I saw it would not be enough to carry me through this discussion, let alone this decade or the approaching millennium.

  “We were looking for the right analogy, the right metaphor that would show us how to conduct the next round of experiments. We were in a furious, often-mistaken model-building stage. Exciting—unmatched for human effort, as far as it went. But slippery. You see, DNA is itself a model, a repertoire for proteins. And the convolutions of protein shape are themselves analogies for the processes they facilitate. In programmers’ terms …”. He gestured through the one-way glass to the computer room. On the other side, Frank Todd stood on a chair, making sublime, exaggerated, Buster Keaton
gestures for the entertainment of Annie Martens. She was trying to leave for the evening, and he was clowning her into staying a little longer. I watched as he gave up, thumbing nose at her. She laughed and waved goodbye.

  “You’re not supposed to know how to program,” I objected.

  Ressler smiled. “In programmers’ terms, the incredibly complex chemical routines of the cell blur the distinction between data and instruction. All this is an overly long digression to give you some idea of what preoccupied me when I first heard Bach’s solution for recombining his modest aria. I lay there in bed, concentrating on a line in a particular variation. Say, the first entry of a canon, although I could not at the time have told you what a canon was. After intensive, repeated listening, I could hear the first suggestion of what had covertly fascinated me. The strain separated like an independent filament of DNA—part of the melodic line, but simultaneously apart. I made the momentous discovery that it was a note-for-note transcription of the master melody. My little fragment played against a copy of the musical idea it had just been, a moment before. Disengaging my focus, transferring it from the first to the second voice, I could hear the same fragment matched against the shred it would in the next moment become. When I shifted awareness like this for any length of time, the whole variation, at first inscrutable, dissipated into crabs crawling over each other in a bucket. Just as my ears got hold of the rhythm, it would strobe hot potato with the motive. The two lines would twine themselves back into a double strand. I had found my model for replication.”

  Dr. Ressler pulled on his earlobes, a characteristic gesture he used whenever he caught himself being inexplicably human. “I thought: ‘No wonder this Bach fella is so great a composer. He anticipates Watson and Crick by two hundred years.’ Idiot! And I grew worse with the piece before it was all over. It didn’t take me long to discover in the music all sorts of outrageous parallels. Nor was it all my fault. The piece has the same numerology as the systems we were working with. Do you know how the variations are built?”

  I shook my head. Music had never been a formal thing to me. It had always been a run of expressive moments—urgencies that words only interfered with. But I watched in fascination as Dr. Ressler stood and walked to the turntable, curtly jerked the needle. He placed it back down on side one, track one, and to my astonishment, when the music started again, he began to sing. But not the melody, not the right-hand filigree I had concentrated on when learning to hack out the little aria. He sang,

  instead, the simple sequence spelled out in the bass. “This,” he said, “is what the composer will vary through his gigantic construction. Not the melody; the harmonic sequence. The first great analysis of the piece, written at the moment of Mendel’s triple rediscovery, set a precedent by calling this theme the Base. Handy English coincidence.” He sang, batching the Base into four-note blocks:

  He launched into numerology: triplet triads over each theme note. Superimposed over those first four triplet rungs, a diversionary tune that, with grace notes, contains twenty tones. Two halves of the aria, each sixteen bars, both scored to repeat, totaling sixty-four measures. He went to his earlobe again. “All the numbers we were after. The coincidence meant nothing, of course. But to a snot-nosed kid of twenty-five, the exercise was invigorating.” To an old woman of thirty, too. It brought out the closet gnostic to hear him talk. Not for the correlations themselves, at best novelties, but for the look at a mind that years of night shift had not put to sleep. One that still drew connections between all things, if now only with embarrassment at its own profusion. A mind that looked for the pattern of patterns, the structure that mirrored mind itself, gave it something to recognize in the landscape around it.

  This was my first introduction to musical experience I had not even suspected existed. As Dr. Ressler sang along with the record player, I began to see that he listened to these variations not as if they followed one after another, but as if they stacked up simultaneously, sounding all at once in an unhearable polyphonic chorus. He listened to the world, more attuned to its awful fullness than its expendable melody: a set of variations all based on one, simple, thirty-two-note ground bass; a giant passacaglia preserving the harmonic structure of the original, fleshing it out into every conceivable design.

  My hush made Ressler self-conscious. He snorted. “As you can imagine, I fast approached the conviction that either everything in the universe fit into a regular pattern or that I was, at my tender age, perilously close to a weekend at what people in the late fifties were fond of calling the Funny Farm.”

  I looked away from his self-deflation, through the silvered glass at Todd, preparing a night’s work in the other room. Although he could not see us through the mirror, Frank now and then looked up at the room where his delinquent shiftmate sat talking. Ressler, anxious to join him, wound up with that favorite expression of Bach: All things must be possible. A pedagogical goading-on to performances that lay just outside the fingers. What exactly did the phrase mean? “Everything that is, is possible” was possible, if redundant. “All things that might be, can be” rubbed up in my mind against unlikelihood. Yet an evolutionist might say the same. All permutations on an amino acid theme are possible; given sufficient time and the persistent tick of the mutation clock, everything might be tried, with varying success. Not every experiment will fly; but every conceivable message string is—whatever the word means—possible.

  The mind, emerging from blind patterning in possession of catastrophic awareness, condensed the eon-work of random field trials into instants. Did Bach’s baroque ditty harbor the political horrors of Ressler’s own lifetime? Everything that humans can imagine will be implemented. Bergen-Belsen, Nagasaki, Soweto, Armenia, Bhopal: he had lived through all manner of atrocity. These mutations too were built on the little phrase, and then some. To listen to a theme and variations, he suggested, one had to be prepared for dissonance severe enough to destroy even the original theme.

  “You see,” Ressler at last broke our moratorium, “once the experiment gets underway, all possible outcomes are already implied.” He spoke with a spittle of fear in his throat. “The impossibly delicate pineal folds of your ear, for instance. Just one of the infinite ways a child’s ear might unfold.” He winced, as if at the memory of a specific child. He ended our first lesson by returning to the phonograph and lifting the needle. “I listened to these miniatures for a year, pulled out of them the most marvelous genetic analogies. But at the end, the music refused to reduce, and it hurt worse than before. I was a good empiricist, and just as causality was forbidden me, so was prescription. All an empiricist is allowed to do about terrible possibility is describe it. All things being possible, description is everything.”

  He grew curt, perhaps ashamed at choosing this moment to break so long a silence. He asked forgiveness with his eyes—ridiculously inappropriate. Only with a woman twenty years younger, one he’d known just weeks, could he reveal his ambivalence toward human company, the host in the hermit. Quietly, his back turned as he punched a few console keys, he asked, “Do you think it would cost you a great effort to recover what you’ve lost?”

  I couldn’t for the life of me make out what he was talking about. Then it hit me: my piano skills, never more than modest. He wanted someone to play for him. “Do you two have a baby grand tucked away in all this electronics?”

  “I’ll get one tomorrow.” He laughed, a sound that went straight into my chest.

  Time passed before Dr. Ressler trusted us with the rest of the story; he’d dug a great deal more out of the sarabande than a handful of genetic metaphors. He had discovered, in the most painful way, why the aria and its wayward children made unsponsored appearances in his mind’s ears, keeping him awake in his barracks at night. It cost him considerably to find out. The music would remain unlistenable for decades. Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

  I would never get from him, in so many
words, why he chose the moment of Todd’s arrival to return to the unlistenable piece. Why take it up again, just then, obsessively, once more finding in it more than he suspected? Perhaps it had something to do with the incurable Bach’s other favorite quote. Asked how he made the keyboard perform miracles of interchanging voices when he possessed only the same finger-bound hands as the rest of mankind, he would say: It’s simple. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself.

  DOUBLE CHECK

  Three months under the bridge; with frugality and luck, eight more in front of me before I have to hit the classifieds. Sickening to consider, so I won’t. Human prerogative. Still: three months of reading, jotting, recalling. It feels as if I quit yesterday, that I’m on that most contrived of civilized symbolic stopgaps, a vacation.

  A quarter year of unbroken booking and I begin to acquire a layman’s understanding of mutation at the molecular level. Information in the nucleic acid string is carried by the order of base pairs, the sequences of genes. The sum of gene messages—the tangled program of genotype— expands from single egg to runaway cell civilization. The same linear long set (more possible messages than atoms in the universe) chemically juggles the whole fantastic hierarchy until at last it impairs itself with old age and dissolves.

  I have a rough analogy of the master plan. Each DNA spiral is two chains. The rules of complementary base pairing and the undulating regularity of the molecule give each half-helix the ability to act as imprint for the whole. This trick of molecules to sort, arrange, and assemble odd parts of random world into copies of themselves arose spontaneously, from the early chemical mix and the energy of an electrical storm. Miller produced the essential building blocks by exposing hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor to electrical discharge and ultraviolet light. By 1956, Khorana had synthesized polynucleotides in the lab. Ressler was then younger than Todd is now, and I was a toddler.